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Expert reviews and ratings

Total War: Rome 2 is still rickety in many places and, for all its improvements, it remains a very similar experience. It's not worth getting now if you were on the fence before. It's not a radically different experience or a dramatically changed game.

It didn't take long, but we soon came to a point within our Total War: Rome II empire-building where it would have been much nicer to just build a big wall around our smattering of conquered lands, put up a “Go Away” sign or two, and live out the rest of...

Creating an epic strategy game, like running a sprawling empire, is no easy task. There's a lot of plates to keep spinning, and in both cases when things get too big to handle a level of collapse is almost inevitable. It's ironic, then, that as The...

Few games match the immense scale that's provided in the gameplay of Total War: Rome II. The game lives up to series tradition by offering both an addictive campaign mode and massive real-time battles. While the game stumbles with a flawed end of turn...

Creative Assembly's Total War series of strategy games focuses on realistic, cinematic battles. "Total War: Rome II" is one of the most exciting new games for September, as it continues to improve on the franchise formula while making the gameplay more...

The setting and gameplay of Total War: Rome II are a perfect match, giving us some of the most satisfying and visually striking tactical battles we've ever seen in video games. The campaign systems are absorbing and full of meaningful decisions that make me feel like I’m in charge of my own victories and defeats.

Armed with a new engine, Rome II looks great, plays smoothly, and will be a challenge to both veterans and novices. One of the most immersive strategy games available, you can easily get swept up in the narrative you write for yourself, scrawled in the blood of barbarians from one side of Europe to the other, experiencing triumph and disaster as you seek to reenact one of history’s greatest stories.

For millennia, war has altered the face of the world in which we live. Men could earn their freedom, families could rise to or fall from power, and nations could leave their mark on history. It serves as the dramatic fuel for some of humanity's greatest stories, both fictional and real. Total War: Rome II brings that drama back in a great way.

The Total War series has always been about the balance between small- and large-scale conflict, and Rome II has taken that philosophy to its logical conclusion. In your quest to conquer Ancient Europe, you groom generals and warlords for command, curb...

No one can doubt the ambition of Total War: Rome II. Not only is it the long-awaited sequel to a beloved game, but also it's the biggest and boldest Total War to date. Ambition is a double-edged sword, though. While Total War fans will get their fix...

I'd like to call myself a Total War Veteran (some would use another word) having been into this series of games since the beginning and notched up over a thousand hours over all the Total War titles (except last year's Total War Battles: Shogun). So I...

Let me get this out of the way first, so there’s no mistaking the position I’m coming from: Playing through Total War: Rome 2 for review has been a bit of a disappointment, I’m not going to lie. Don’t run for the hills yet, please hear me out. Or skip...

Total War: Rome II 12Next »The Roman senate will weep for Crassipes. They’ll talk proudly of how the great general threw himself against the walls of Massalia. They’ll talk of how he burned the gates and took the central square, and how a dozen Averni...

Right now, Rome 2 has its flaws, but is still a sumptuous, slow-burn strategy game with some of the best land battles in the series. Aesthetically, it’s a triumph. Empire management, alliances, the UI and battlefields have all improved, which makes it doubly frustrating to encounter the floppy AI that will be extremely familiar to Total War fans by now.

By themselves, none of the things that are wrong with Total War: Rome 2 are that big a deal. If the game itself were an empire, a map upon a wall, we'd note some gains and some losses, glossing over most of the tinier problems because they don't spoil the larger picture. We also might note the stagnation of that empire.

If you know what you're getting into, or are at least patient enough to figure out everything on offer, Rome II is a worthy continuation of the franchise and an overdue update to one of the greatest strategy games of all time. It's every bit as vast and absorbing as you've come to expect.